


Paper Cranes by the Thousand

by endstiel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Childhood Friends, Divorce, Family Issues, Fluff, Gen or Pre-Slash, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-26
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-02-06 06:28:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1847851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endstiel/pseuds/endstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>According to Japanese legend, anyone who folds a thousand paper cranes, will be granted a wish.</i><br/>When Dean and Cas are children, they meet in the hospital waiting room and Castiel teaches Dean how to fold paper cranes and make a wish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Cranes by the Thousand

It’s all Dean’s fault. Sammy is hurt, he’s screaming in pain and curled in fetal position on the dirty ground of their back yard, and all Dean can do is stare, his eyes welling up, hot and wet, as he watches his brother curled and shaking in pain. It’s all his fault.

Sam’s wails ring through the air and soon enough, their mom comes rushing out of the house to the backyard where the two boys are, looking concerned as she tries to soothe Sam. “What happened?” she asks, trying to remain calm.

Dean opens his mouth to reply, but nothing comes out. There’s no way he can reply when he can’t stop shaking.

“Dean―” she says more forcibly this time, startling the words out of him.

“We were trying to build a tree fort when Sam fell out of the tree and he started screaming and I wasn’t sure what to do. Is he gonna be alright?” he asks, the words finally tumbling out, one right after another. But now that he’s started, he’s afraid that if he doesn’t stop, he’ll just end up crying.

Sensing his fear and guilt, Mary’s expression softens slightly as she looks at her oldest son. “It’s okay, baby. He’ll be alright. We’ll need to get him to the hospital, though. Can you help me move him?”

He nods and helps his mom carry Sam to the car.

Once they arrive at the hospital, Dean is told to sit in the waiting room and nearly an hour goes by as he fiddles his thumbs nervously, trying to hold back tears. The time alone has helped calm him a little, but not by much, and every time his mind wanders, remembering what happened to his little brother, his eyes begin to sting.

But the last thing he wants to do is cry like a baby, especially in public, so to get his mind off of what’s happening to his brother, he decides to look around the waiting room at all the people sitting and waiting with him.

There is a young couple laughing and smiling as their toddler plays with one of the toys from the treasure chest for little kids, and Dean scrunches his nose slightly, imagining how many germs there are on that toy. It’s probably been here for years, being touched and chewed on by every child who’s visited. Funny how for a place known for being so clean, they still provide children with germy toys. Or maybe they clean them everyday. Dean wouldn’t know either way, though.

Across the room, a teenage girl and her mom bicker about something in hushed tones. From the snippets Dean’s heard from the conversation, he’s pretty sure the girl wants a set of throwing knives and is upset that her mom won’t buy them for her.

Disinterested, dean goes back to ignoring their conversation and looking around the room, gazing at the last person, a young boy about Dean’s age, who is sitting a couple seats away from him.

The boy is surrounded by a stack of colorful, square paper that he is meticulously folding into small objects and dropping the objects into a large mason jar when he’s finished. From what Dean can tell, it looks like he’s very skilled at what he’s doing and would make the things faster if it weren’t for the oversized trench coat he’s wearing with sleeves that stretch beyond his wrists, getting in the way of his working fingers.

Dean's never watched someone focus that intensely on folding paper before, and before he can stop himself, he gets up and approaches the boy, who looks up at him with bright blue eyes.

“What are you doing?” Dean asks.

“I’m making paper cranes.”

“Paper― what?”

The boy smiles nervously before replying, “Paper cranes. Anna, my big sister, told me that if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you can have a wish granted.”

“And you believe that?” Dean asks.

“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

He nods, deciding not to burst the boy’s bubble and tell him his idea is nonsense. Instead, he sits in the chair beside the boy and watches him work for a minute before asking, “So what are you gonna wish for?”

“I’m gonna ask for my sister to get better. She gets bad headaches and sometimes she’s in so much pain she can’t leave her bed for the whole day,” the boy says and stops to think a moment before adding, “and also a guinea pig, so I can name him Herbert.”

Dean snorts. “Herbert’s a dumb name.”

“Well, then we’ll be a pair, because I have a dumb name, too.”

“Oh, yeah? What is it?”

“Castiel.”

“Bless you.”

The boy shoots him a look as if he can’t decide whether Dean is joking or not. “I wasn’t sneezing! That’s my name.”

Dean laughs, sticking out his hand for the boy to take. “I’m Dean. And your name’s alright, Cas―”

“Cas _tiel_.”

“‘snot nearly as horrible as Herbert.”

After a soft silence settles between the two, Castiel asks, “Would you like to make a paper crane, Dean?”

“I don’t know how.”

“That’s okay, I can show you,” Castiel says, grabbing one of the colorful papers from the stack and handing it to Dean. He talks Dean through each step, taking his hands and guiding his fingers through the steps Dean has trouble with, much to Dean’s embarrassment. Soon enough though, he gets the hang of it and he shouts in victory after he is able to make a paper crane on his own.

Time goes by and the two boys settle into a rhythm, making light conversation as they fold their paper cranes and toss their finished birds into their own respective piles. And as Dean folds the wings on his fourteenth bird that night, Castiel asks, “What are you gonna wish for when you get to a thousand?”

Dean shrugs. “I dunno. I’ll decide when I get closer to the number, I guess. But probably a guinea pig so I can name him Herbert.”

Castiel wrinkles his nose, shoving Dean lightly and squealing when Dean shoves him back a bit harder. They shove and poke one another until Castiel pushes his entire weight on top of Dean, pinning him to the ground. Dean wiggles and squirms underneath him, trying to get free, and both boys erupt into giggles as they play wrestle beside their piles and piles of paper cranes.

 

Everyday for a year after their meeting, Dean makes a paper crane. As he folds each bird, he wonders what Castiel is doing and if he’s reached one thousand yet. He wonders if he’ll ever reach one thousand. It seems like too big of a number, too unattainable to even dream of reaching, but he likes the way the paper creases under his fingers and the way sometimes the bird is the same color as Castiel’s eyes. And that’s what makes Dean keep going; remembering that Castiel is out there, and that maybe when he reaches one thousand, he could wish to see his friend again.

Throughout his room, hangs nearly three hundred and seventy-nine paper cranes now. And from what Dean has calculated, he only has six hundred and twenty-one left before he reaches one thousand, and then he can make his wish.

Dean folds his three hundred and eightieth with practiced ease, creasing it in half and then in half again to make a triangle. But as he begins the next step, a soft knock on his door brings his attention from the patterned paper in his hands and he looks up to see his mom enter his room.

She sits at the edge of his bed, looking around his room at all the birds hanging from the ceiling. “You’re pretty close now, aren’t you?” she asks.

“Almost at four hundred now,” Dean beams, before his smile falls slightly. “Dad said it was stupid though― making all these paper cranes.”

“Did he say that?”

Dean nods slightly, focusing his attention back to the half-folded bird in his hands.

He felt his mother’s sad gaze on him, before she scoffs bitterly and mumbles, “Wouldn’t be the first time he said something was stupid.”

He didn’t have to ask what she meant.

 

By the time he folds his seven hundred and eleventh paper crane, the screaming becomes routine. They aren’t blood-curdling screams of someone being attacked in an alleyway, but they’re screams of pain all the same― screams of pain, of frustration, of desperation. They’re screams of accusations and money problems, they’re screams of ‘ _you’re not listening to me_ ’ and ‘ _you’re never home_ ,’ and Dean holds his little brother, whose broken bones have long since healed, as the screams rattle the floorboards.

The thing is, arguments always start small and quiet. A question, a statement. Then there’s the defense and the tension that grows from it. They’re hushed arguments, vicious words spat through whispers. But at some point, it’s hard to tell when, something will just snap and the loud shouts ring through the house.

And as Dean’s stomach swells and his body trembles with a strange fear of something he can’t quite place, little Sam will run into Dean’s room to wait out the storm. He huddles in his big brother’s arms covering his ears, and Dean will hum ‘Hey, Jude’ softly as he continues folding the paper birds with shaky fingers.

“Now, look here, Sam,” Dean murmurs as he works. “An angel once taught me a magic spell to get rid of bad things.”

“An angel?”

He hums in reply, “That’s right. The angel told me that if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish.”

“Really? What are you going to wish for?”

The slam of the front door sounds through the house, rattling the walls, and both boys flinch in each other’s arms.

Dean wants to say he’ll wish for his parents to stay together, but now as he sits on his bed with his little brother, hearing their dad’s car pull out of the driveway, he realizes that paper birds and little children’s wishes can’t keep broken homes together.

 

On Dean’s seventeenth birthday, Mary enters his room and sits on the edge of his bed as he flips through a classic car magazine. “What do you want, Mom?” he asks without glancing up.

Mary doesn’t reply for a moment and instead gazes at the posters of cars and women covering the walls. The paper cranes have long since been taken down and there’s no sign of a wishful child anymore, only the vague impression of a cynical and bitter young man. And it pains her to see the how even though her and John have been divorced for a little over four years and he barely comes around anymore, John still finds a way to impact her sons’ lives.

“What happened to all those colorful paper cranes of yours?” she asks almost nostalgically and Dean only shrugs in return.

“Grew up, I guess,” he mumbles, before adding. “And besides, what teenage boy folds paper for fun? That’s fucking ridiculous.”

Mary nods and she can’t help but miss the ten-year-old with chubby cheeks and sticky hands who giggled as he introduced her to his new friend, Castiel, whom he met in the hospital waiting room. She misses walking into his colorful room and seeing all the bright paper birds hanging on strings and she misses the way he’d talk about wishing to meet Castiel again when he reaches one thousand.

But now, he never brings up with old friend and all wishes of meeting his friend again have been tossed away like the paper birds.

 

When Dean goes into school on Monday morning, the hallways are filled with whispers of some new kid. He doesn’t really concern himself with any students, new or old, at his school, but he can’t help but overhear some girls talking about the kid as he grabs his books for english from his locker.

“I don’t know. I mean, he’s really cute,” one girl says. “But he doesn’t say much and just stares a lot, it’s kinda creepy.”

Another girl nods in agreement. “Yeah, and he’s always making those weird arigoomi things.”

“I think it’s pronounced ‘origami’, dummy,” a third girl says and they all erupt into a fit of giggles.

Dean doesn’t really pay much thought to their comments and heads to this first bell, english. He isn’t every good at english, just barely getting by with a C average, but he doesn’t really care anymore, much to the chagrin of his teachers.

He makes his way into the classroom with a couple minutes to spare and sits in the back of the room as the rest of the students pile in, finding their way to their designated seats. After a few moments pass, the teacher, Mrs. Harvelle, enters the room and announces that this class period should be used as a study hall for students who need to catch up on work in her class, and Dean scoffs. No one ever actually uses study hall to study, and he sure as hell won’t either.

Instead, he people-watches.

Dean isn’t sure when he started people-watching, it’s just a random habit he picked up as a kid, he guesses, but there is something very entertaining about looking around a room and watching people as they go about their lives and activities, unaware of being watched. And now that he thinks about it, it’s actually kind of creepy, but he shrugs it off and looks around the room as the students around him talk amongst themselves.

From the opposite side of the room, Jo talks to Victor about her brand new set of throwing knives she got for her birthday. And from the way Victor hangs on her every word, looking as if he’s about to melt any second, you’d think she’d be talking about something cute like kittens or flowers, not her violent hobbies.

Not too far away from Jo and Victor sits the sweet but nerdy and somewhat obnoxious Becky who is writing hurriedly on a sheet of paper. Judging from her appearance, it’d seem like she’d be working on extra credit or an assignment for school, but after Dean bumped into her in the hallway, scattering her notebooks and binders all over the floor, he found out that instead of writing anything academic, she wrote hardcore gay porn in her free time. Shivering at the memories, Dean moves on.

He watches more students in the room, grazing past Charlie and Kevin arguing about who was the better Captain Kirk, Lisa reading a Sophie Kinsella novel, and Gordon with his earbuds in, no doubt blasting misogynist rap music into his head, and finally, his eyes rest on a hunched over figure in the corner. The new kid, he guesses.

His eyes rake over the boy, moving from the rumpled, tan trench coat he’s wearing to the tuft of dark brown hair atop his head. He’s hunched, sitting at an angle at his desk, so Dean can’t see his face or what he’s working so hard on, and Dean can’t help but feel a strange sense of déjà vu as he watches the boy work.

Before he realizes it, he’s gotten up and made his way across the room to where the boy is sitting, and now, as he stands in front of him, he sees the boy’s long, nimble fingers quickly folding a square sheet of green paper.

“What are you doing?” he asks, and the boy looks up with bright blue eyes staring at him curiously. After the boy doesn’t respond for a moment, Dean rolls his eyes, repeating himself. “I said, what are you doing?”

“Oh, oh. Sorry,” the boy mumbles a bit. “I, uh. I’m making paper cranes.”

Dean glances down at the half-made paper bird in the boys hands and he can’t help but crack a tiny smile as the memories of his childhood spent in the hospital making paper birds with his strange new friend. He chuckles a bit at the memories before sitting down unceremoniously next to the new kid. “No way, I used to make these as a kid,” he says more to himself than to the boy. “There was this weird kid that showed me how to make them.”

He plays with the wings of a finished bird and looks up to see the new kid staring at him with wide eyes.

“What made you stop?” The boy asks after a moment, penetrating eyes still staring widely Dean.

“Huh?”

“You used past tense. What made you stop?”

The sound of screaming and slamming doors ring through his mind, and Dean shakes his head. “Nothing. Nothing. I guess, there comes a point when you realize that wishing on paper birds is not more than a stupid childhood fairytale.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid. There’s something nice and simple about folding birds and thinking about what you’ll wish for when you get to one thousand. It gives you a weird sense of hope, I guess,” the boy murmurs as he places the finished green paper crane in front of Dean and grabs another square sheet of paper to start a new bird.

“Oh, yeah? Then what will you wish for?”

The boy shrugs, “I’m not sure. When I was little, I thought I'd wish for my sister to stop getting headaches or for a pet guinea pig, but by the time I finally did fold my one-thousandth paper crane, I found myself wishing for something else entirely. A friend.”

Now it was Dean’s turn to stare. Is the kid serious? Wow, that’s really….cheesy. “A friend?” he repeats.

“Don’t look at me like that,” the boy says, chuckling nervously. “I know how cheesy it sounds. But, it’s just…” he trails off, looking away as if he’s trying to find the words. “I never really had many friends growing up. Kids my age usually disliked me for a variety of reasons. But one day, while I was folding paper cranes in the hospital waiting room while waiting for my sister, I met this boy who didn’t really care that I was weird and different. He just liked me for me and it was nice to feel like I had a friend, even though we had just met.

“So, I guess when I say I’d wish for a friend, I guess I mean that I’d wish for someone like Dean,” he says, staring at the half-made paper crane in his hands, and Dean watches him curiously as the pieces come together.

A strange boy with blue eyes. Paper cranes. Childhood friends. Silly wishes for guinea pigs turned to yearnings for friendship. Castiel.

How is it after all this time, after wishing to see the boy again and finally giving up on the whole “wish” thing, he’s finally face to face with his old friend.

“Cas…” he finds himself whispering, breaking off before he can finish the name. Castiel looks up, his bright, blue eyes meeting Dean’s.

Castiel wrinkles his nose in the same adorable way Dean remembers. “What?”

He wants to reply, but he’s too overwhelmed by all the thoughts flying around to even dream of forming a coherent sentence. Castiel is looking at him curiously now, tilting his head as he stares at him. Finally, Dean manages, “So, uh. Did you ever get a guinea pig named Herbert?”

Castiel just gapes at Dean, not responding for a moment as he tries to wrap his mind around all that's just happened. But Dean can see the gears turning behind his blue eyes as he pieces everything together the way Dean had just moments ago, and he’s able to choke out a faint, “Dean.”

As everything dawns on both boys, they can’t help but stare, mouths gaping, as they take in the presence of their childhood friend, who they believed they’d never meet again. And instead of saying anything further, Castiel drops the paper crane to throw his arms around his old friend. They laugh, holding each other tightly, not caring that the students around them are watching them, and on the desk sits two finished green and blue paper cranes.


End file.
